Staging choreographies for team training in multiple virtual worlds based on ontologies and alignments

Abstract

In this paper we present an approach that makes possible the staging of choreographies for education and training purposes in potentially any virtual world platform. A choreography is seen here as the description of a set of actions that must or may be executed by a group of participants, including the goals to be achieved and any restrictions that may exist. We present a system-architecture and the formalization of a set of processes that are able to transform a choreography from a platform-independent representation into a specific virtual world platform's representation. We adopt an ontology-based approach with distinct levels of abstraction for capturing and representing multi-actors and multi-domain choreographies to be staged in virtual world platforms with distinct characteristics. Ontologies are characterized according to two complementary dimensions - choreography's domain (independent and dependent) and virtual world platform (independent and dependent) - giving rise to four ontologies. Ontology mappings between these ontologies enable the automatic generation of a choreography for virtually any target virtual world platform, thus reducing the time and effort of the choreography development. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.